


Kitchen Privileges and How to Wear a Towel

by CurlicueCal, LaughingStones



Series: Shadowbound AU [4]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Demonstuck, Humanstuck, M/M, Soul Bond, Soulmates, magic as science, shadows as daemons/familiars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-27
Updated: 2016-08-27
Packaged: 2018-08-11 10:19:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7887448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CurlicueCal/pseuds/CurlicueCal, https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaughingStones/pseuds/LaughingStones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gamzee Makara is surprisingly easy to live with and Dirk is losing his mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kitchen Privileges and How to Wear a Towel

In the week since Gamzee had moved in, Dirk had made a number of observations about his new roommate. He was keeping a mental record, internally titled “Behavioral Oddities of Gamzee Makara.” (Hal had titled it “Embarrassingly Obvious Excuses to Stare at Your Compulsive Crush”, but Dirk was refusing to acknowledge this.) 

Item one: A peculiar caution with his possessions, possibly related to the paucity thereof. Gamzee had only blinked at Dirk’s offer to help move him in, and then turned up on his own three hours later with two bags, a box of art supplies, and a guitar. All of which he’d promptly vanished into his newly-cleared room. 

He wasn’t exactly _private_ with his things--Gamzee seemed perfectly willing to spread his belongings around him in the communal spaces--but only so long as he was sitting right there in their midst. As soon as he got up to move, all his stuff came with him, gathered carefully together and stuffed back in his room again, protected by a shadow-tuned padlock on the door. He never left a hoodie draped over the back of the sofa, or his guitar leaned up against the chair he’d been practicing in. It was like he was expecting anything he left out to be gone when he got back to it. 

Item two: Possibly related, a reluctance to treat common areas as though he lived in them. Which was funny from a guy whose shadow could take over an entire room like he was entitled to it. Gamzee was comfortable when he was _in_ a space, and yet he kept checking for permission to be there in the first place. Anytime he came into the living room and found Dirk there before him, he’d hesitate. If Dirk didn't look up to acknowledge him with at least a nominally welcoming sort of glance, Gamzee would edge over to the sofa or chair and perch like he was expecting to be kicked out at any minute. 

And then, just two days ago, he’d popped out with a “Hey, you mind if I get at using the kitchen for a bit, hour or two maybe? Gonna need some of that counter space. And the oven. That okay?” 

Dirk had been completely bewildered as to why he’d be considered The Keeper of Kitchen Permissions. (Especially the oven. The counter made sense because Dirk’s projects tended to encroach on any unoccupied flat area left unattended for more than two seconds, but he had no idea why Gamzee expected him to be possessive of the oven.) 

It was somehow not any less bewildering to now live in an apartment where extravagant pastries, pies, and bread products kept turning up in the midst of ramen and bargain-bin canned soup. For the last two days, the whole place had smelled delicious. 

Item two point five: If Gamzee could cook like that why did he still eat utter junk for every single regular meal? This really didn’t have a place on the list, the dichotomy just got under Dirk’s skin. Seriously. The guy ate _spray cheese on toast for breakfast._ He was worse than Dirk, and Dirk was well aware his own eating habits were less than ideal. (Jane would put it in stronger terms. He tried not to eat where Jane could see.) 

Item three: The dude was almost criminally laid-back. The stacks of boxes formerly in Gamzee’s bedroom had truncated their migration in a haphazard arrangement along the living room walls, but he hadn’t so much as commented. The sprawl of wires and scrap parts around the workbench was waxing into one of its broader and more entangling phases with Dirk’s current project and Gamzee maneuvered his way through and around it without even seeming to notice the inconvenience. And three days in, he’d wandered past where Dirk was working and casually asked if the small fire in the waste bin was intentional. Then he’d continued on to his own room, completely unconcerned, while Dirk got the fire under control. 

Item three point fucking five: He was just as laid-back about the concept of clothes. Gamzee Makara had no idea about nudity taboos. The first time he stepped out of the shower he had obviously decided the most important piece of him to cover with the towel was his hair. Dirk had no idea what expression had been on his face when Gamzee ambled through the living room on the way to his room, but judging by the brief hitch in Gamzee’s step, Hal’s reaction must have given something away. 

The second time Gamzee had left the shower, the rather small towel was properly wrapped around his waist. Dirk might have been more appreciative of this friendly concession if Gamzee hadn’t spent the next three hours wearing nothing else as he sprawled on the couch watching TV, long brown legs splayed, one foot resting on the floor. Every time he shifted position, the towel threatened to slip off entirely. Inexplicably, Dirk’s concentration was not at its best, and he made very little progress on his project. 

Item three point infinity (which, in an infinite universe, looped back around to Dirk’s original point, leaving the whole embarrassing nudity digression somewhere on another plane): the laid-back thing extended even to Hal, which was just unreal. 

Case in point: the situation tonight. 

_Can you hear me now?_ Hal chirped. 

“Yeah, brother,” Gamzee said peaceably, much as he had the last twenty-seven times. “Hear you just fine.” He was lying on the sofa, head dangling off the front, legs extending up the wall, doodling something in a sketchbook. His shadow climbed around his legs, snaking up to the ceiling to loom over the brightly-lit room. 

The TV was off, the curtains drawn against the dark street outside. For perhaps the first time, both housemates were content to share space without particular purpose, not gaming or watching a stream or whatever, just working on their own pursuits in companionable silence. It was a peaceful night--or had been before Hal took up his current campaign. 

Dirk gritted his teeth and rolled his chair around the counter to the kitchen to grab his smallest screwdriver. For about five seconds he thought Hal might have finally satisfied his… whatever this was. 

_Can you hear me now?_

Dirk twitched and lost the tiny screw in the dark shadow under the kitchen table. 

“Sure thing, brother.” 

_Are you planning to do this all night?_ Dirk asked mentally, as calmly as he could whilst hunting near-invisible screws across the linoleum floor. He found it, and dragged chair, screw and screwdriver back to the living room and his workbench. 

_Do what?_ Hal said innocently. _Can you hear me now?_

“Yeah, brother.” 

It was like he didn’t even register the constant pestering. Or like he somehow didn’t notice the gnat-like annoyance of it. Was the dude not capable of negative reactions outside of life-threatening situations? Or was he just used to hanging out with three-year-olds? 

_You’re just jealous of my perfectly executed scientific inquiry,_ Hal said, and then paused. 

_Don’t do it,_ Dirk warned. 

Hal waited three more beats. _Can you hear me now?_

Dirk slammed to his feet, glaring at his shadow where he lounged on the wall by the couch. 

Gamzee looked over at Dirk and raised an eyebrow, grinning half in question as he answered Hal. “Got my ears full of you, bro.” 

Dirk sat back down and pretended he was not slowly losing his mind. Or living with a freaking mind-reader. Shadow-reader. Whatever. 

He had been mildly concerned in the first few days of their cohabitation at the way his shadow-brother locked up in Gamzee’s presence, gone uncharacteristically reticent in the face of an eavesdropper. Not that Dirk was any more adept than Hal at dealing with the constant sense of being exposed. (Uncovered. Vulnerable. Bared. Dirk had a whole list of synonyms. Amazingly, extensive labelling did not help.) 

At some point in the past twenty-four hours, however, Hal’s tactics had shifted completely, discomfort transitioning into burgeoning seed of fascination. This morning he’d started dropping random comments to Dirk in Gamzee’s vicinity, and by this afternoon he’d moving on to experimenting with more direct and provocative techniques in his quest for a reaction. Gamzee spent most of this time hunching his shoulders and staring fixedly at whatever he was doing in a painfully transparent pretense at normalcy. Random commentary had not budged him, but Hal’s string of progressively more unlikely insults (aimed, for some reason, mostly at Dirk) had finally provoked him into laughter. Dirk was pretty sure his own dry amusement had shown on his face for a minute there, and seeing it had seemed to be the final key for Gamzee to relax and let himself respond to Hal. (And apparently Gamzee Makara’s relaxation scale went from 0 to 999 with no stops in between. See previously mentioned Item three.) 

Forty-three minutes ago, Hal had graduated from sideways forays into the concept of interpersonal conversation to his current, direct line of inquiry. Dirk really, really wished he was still being cautious and reserved. 

_Can you hear me now?_

“I will turn off the lights,” Dirk said. “I swear to god.” 

A flurry of movement from the couch distracted Dirk from his staredown with Hal and Gamzee landed on the floor with a thump. Puzzled, Dirk took in the wide-eyed look of alarm under the mass of dark hair as Gamzee scrambled to his feet. 

The ripple of energy through the room took him from puzzled to disturbed. Hairs rose on the back of his neck as Gamzee’s shadow swept out to blanket the entire ceiling. Hal abandoned his post on the wall to slip into place at Dirk’s side. 

“No need to up and do that, bro,” Gamzee said, clutching his sketchbook. “We can be at moving into our own room. Get outta your hair if we’ve been all to wearing at you.” 

Dirk blinked, thrown. 

_What makes you think you’re bothering him?_ Hal said. _*I’m* bothering him. And I’m extremely good at it and require no assistance from amateurs._

Gamzee’s eyes slid from Dirk to Hal and back again. His hands stayed tight on the sketchbook, which he held against himself like a shield. He didn’t answer Hal, just eyed Dirk silently. 

His shadow, Dirk realized, had claimed not just the ceiling, but the entire section of the wall around the lightswitch. He licked easily along the wall, that weird energy he sent out prickling against Dirk’s skin and sending spider feet creeping up his spine. 

“Okay,” Dirk said. “So I am sensing that my threat has overshot. Misfire. Ally down. That was not aimed at you, bro. And it was mostly facetious. Well, and sincere. But I would have gone in my room first.” 

_And you wouldn’t have actually done it because I would make your life hell._

“Yes, because that’s so different than the status quo. Seriously. Try me.” 

Gamzee lowered the sketchbook half an inch. “This… ain’t about us? You can tell me if you got your mad on, bro. I’m used to it. Won’t be nothing new to us.” 

Dirk frowned. “You’re taking two sentences of banter a lot more seriously than they deserve. I’m not mad. I promise.” 

_You kind of are, bro._

“I’m not mad _at you_ ,” Dirk corrected, to Gamzee. 

Gamzee nodded slowly, shoulders inching down. “Good to hear. Had the thought on me you were all at meaning to take my brother away.” He tilted his head. “You don’t wanna try that.” 

The mild threat in his stance drew Dirk’s gaze up to the shadow looming on the wall and ceiling above Gamzee. Hal buzzed with repressed interest. _(We could take them_ ,) he said, very, very quietly at the back of Dirk’s brain, like he knew it was a bad idea but just couldn’t help himself. 

_Shh,_ Dirk said back, looking at Gamzee. He was smiling now, but those wide eyes of his had gone hooded. Dirk’s gaze dropped to his feet, where the anchoring end of Gamzee’s shadow twined protectively around him. For most shadows, that anchor was their primary point of physical contact, but Gamzee’s shadow always seemed to be lingering around him as close physically as mentally, sometimes even looping around his legs or climbing to curl down his arms. Now that he thought of it, Dirk had never seen that closed bedroom door without at least a little light coming out from under it, even when he could hear Gamzee snoring. He and his shadow seemed almost desperate not to be separated. 

Item four, he thought blankly, a closeness with his shadow verging on codependency. 

_We’re exceptionally slow today,_ Hal thought. 

_Today? More like all week,_ Dirk replied. _We should have caught on two days in._ He looked back up at Gamzee and deliberately slipped his hands into his pockets. “I don’t have any interest in separating you from your shadow. Messing with your light source would be hella invasive behavior, and I wouldn’t do that without asking.” 

Gamzee’s eyes widened slightly. “Yeah?” 

“Yeah.” Dirk eyed him, disturbed that this basic ethical rule was apparently unexpected. “That’s some mad dubious boundary-violation bullshit. Anybody pulls that on you, wreak havoc in their general vicinity.” 

Gamzee shrugged one shoulder and gave him a slightly odd look. “So as what I up and usually do, my brother.” He watched Dirk a little longer, beginning to smile again, and then plopped back onto the couch, all at once. The sketchbook landed on the cushion beside him. His smile picked up a vicious edge, though it no longer seemed directed at anyone in the room. “‘Least, now that I’m at being big enough that ain’t much of anyone can stop me.” 

As he settled, his shadow pulled back across the ceiling to the wall above the couch, hovering over him like dark, restless wings. On the plus side, Dirk no longer felt like centipedes were trying to take up residence around his spinal column. That knack the shadow had for manipulating emotional frequencies sure made for a super cute party trick. 

Dirk hesitated, and then slowly returned to his seat at the workbench. He swiveled to face Gamzee, who was now fiddling with his pens again, keeping only half an eye on Dirk. So. A shadow-host pair that bonded super young and were extremely clingy. That didn’t sound like an obvious causal relationship or anything, nope. Talk about a psychologist’s playground. Dirk studied Gamzee’s face. Speculations bubbled up in his brain, but he wasn’t quite sure how to formulate a question that wouldn’t be too pushy. What exactly would happen to a thirteen-year-old with a really scary, really premature shadow-bond? 

_So._ Hal said. _Who was turning out the lights on you?_

Dirk winced. 

Gamzee, for his part, only rolled his eyes and shrugged. “Brother, ain’t _nobody_ likes us being us. Any motherfucker with a bone to pick, or thought they knew best--from them as worked at the home, to the whitecoat of the week, to every motherfucking foster family as came my way. Got well and motherfucking used to the knowledge they all thought of Kurloz like poison.” 

Dirk sat in silence for a moment. “Well fuck that noise.” 

_In the ear_ , Hal muttered, and Gamzee smiled again. 

Dirk had a nasty little flashback of the end of the fight in the bakery. (Gamzee’s shoulders hunched, eyes wide in the sudden dimness as he sidled up to Jane.) “...Jane turned out the lights on you.” 

Gamzee actually laughed. “Nah, bro. She just dimmed things down a bit. No trial nor fear in that. That ain’t got no motherfucking relation to lights out for real. Pitch black, no windows, no way out.” His eyes had gone unfocused, looking at nothing Dirk could see, and his voice dropped. “Can’t feel a flicker of him near. You can’t even hear a whisper. It was like he was motherfucking _dead_ .” 

The shadow lurking above him on the wall swept down all at once, sprawling across the sofa, twining a trellis-worth more of vining loops around Gamzee’s arms and legs. In a breath he was entangled to the point that it confused the eye, the borders between shadow and host unclear. 

Gamzee blinked, visibly drawn back from wherever he’d been. He looked down at the coiling darkness stretched across him and smiled--almost too sweet an expression for the unnerving picture they made. His fingers traced the dark shadow lines curving around his wrists. 

_Oh,_ Hal said. 

It was a weirdly intimate moment to be witnessing. It tugged something in low in Dirk’s gut, a warm little twist, like maybe he was watching when he should be leaving the room. 

Which was stupid, because there was objectively _nothing happening._

Gamzee glanced up at Dirk, and for just a moment that sweet smile was aimed straight at him. Dirk was caught for two rapid heartbeats, knifed through by dark eyes and a face half in shadow. Then the smile shifted, broadening to something more friendly than intimate and Dirk could breathe again. 

“Ain’t no trouble nor harm in Jane. Sister’s always done right by me. And you’ve had on your kindness, too, for all we keep striking sparks. Got all my appreciation up at that.” 

Dirk blinked at him a moment longer, stuck for words in the face of all this unguarded sincerity. (What was up with this guy, being so genuine and open all the time, anyway? Hadn’t he ever heard of the good old Freudian standby of repression and emotional lockdown?) 

A response seemed necessary, so Dirk shrugged. He made it through two more beats of awkward silence before he turned back to his workbench and his work, not at all hiding from the uncomfortably attractive dichotomy occupying his couch, open smile and sharp edges intertwined. 

Gamzee, for his part, let the silence ride, now absorbed in inking scrollwork across the back of his hand. Out of the corner of his eye, Dirk watched the pen trace curling lines down long fingers. 

Item five: oh god, what the fuck, why is he hot. 

_Honestly dude, it took you five items to figure that out?_ Hal commented, apparently enough recovered from his own discombobulation to return to his favored pastime of mocking Dirk. Dirk stiffened automatically, before realizing how cryptic that would sound without the internal context. Hal was actually being careful. 

_I called it back at the title of the thing,_ his shadow-brother went on _. Which, by the way, you need to change. Because I am always right._

_No, shut up. Nothing about this requires your input. I can have a mental breakdown completely on my own, thank you._

Hal didn’t bother to respond, just curled in the back of Dirk’s head as always, radiating inescapable smugness. 

Dirk thought again longingly of light switches. Marshalling himself to ignore the distractions both inside and outside his head, he focused his attention on his project and aligning each tiny sensor in the array. It really did require concentration. Each sensor had to be perfectly in sync with the unit next to it, or the whole line would throw each other off. 

Three rows of minute adjustments later, Dirk had finally dropped back into the flow, and a comfortably domestic silence had settled over the room. 

_Can you hear me now?_

Dirk dropped his head to the two inches of clear space in front of him and banged it gently several times. 


End file.
